The challenge of volatile volumes & demanding turn-around times
A long-running business, serving both B2B and e-commerce channels, needed an objective assessment of their current warehouse performance. Their operation was highly specialised, handling the secure and efficient distribution of educational documents.
The primary challenges included:
- Highly volatile order volumes fluctuating by +/- 70% month-to-month which required significant forward-planning.
- Strict SLAs on next-day delivery demanding the warehouse to process on the same-day as the order.
- High-security product handling and labour-intensive manual processes were creating operational drag.
They brought us in for a Supply Chain Diagnostic & Health-Check to identify any practical opportunities to boost efficiency and safety.
Legacy processes & activities
While the facility was well-maintained and the multi-skilled team was highly adaptable, there was a feeling that things were happening “the way they always had”, regardless to change in the business offerings and customer demand over the years.
Data analysis and on-site conversations with the warehouse team helped map 8 distinct product streams across 20 warehouse activities, and identify key operational friction points:
- A sloping floor area between the main doors and dispatch created a pinch-point where people, products, and forklift trucks (FLTs) crossed paths.
- Goods were being moved into racking, pulled out for manual processing, and put back into storage, creating unnecessary double-handling.
- A lack of barcoding meant location tracking in their system relied entirely on manual entry.
Practical recommendations over costly changes
The operation wasn’t broken, but there were some clear opportunities for improvement. We provided a strategic roadmap focused on three high-impact areas, all with varying levels of ease and cost of implementing:
- Instead of manually pre-processing all items into packs of 10, we recommended shipping a large proportion of products in their original manufacturer cartons. To further reduce double handling, we designed a plan to shift smaller, more frequent inventory deliveries directly into a newly created manual processing zone on receipt.
- To secure high-value educational documents, we proposed extending the secured cage area to include the Goods-In and processing workflow, replacing physical keys with ID-tagged cage entry to create an automated digital access log, as well as installing targeted surveillance cameras to protect inventory and staff.
- We positioned the idea of a Workload Tracker that would evaluate the order well in real-time. Instead of constantly reacting to incoming orders, managers could instead build predictable daily work profiles, allowing staff to stay focused on a single task longer to maximize productivity before switching gears just-in-time for dispatch.
Instead of suggesting costly disruptions, we enabled a clear dialogue across the supply chain team. We divided the remaining opportunities into quick wins and longer-term projects, ensuring they had clear direction to support the business as it continues to grow.
By shifting from legacy habits to data-driven flow management, this operation successfully minimised bottlenecks, drastically cut manual handling times, and fortified its high-security chain of custody, all without disrupting its next-day delivery promise.
